We’re back, but we’re on European time, so posting will be dazed and confused for a while. We’re catching up on hundreds and hundreds of emails, and thousands of links in our RSS and to be honest, we’re probably just going to shine it on.

As for my trip, my head is swimming with castles and ghosts and tombs. I stayed at a haunted medieval inn in Birmingham, and should you have cause to go there, I highly recommend staying at the Old Crown. The ghost in the room kept switching on the light, one time when I was staring directly at it. We also visited Warwick Castle, (where there photos accompanying this were taken.) While it’s now run by Tussauds, in the off season there were few jugglers and other costumed types running around, allowing us to enjoy just wandering around a castle.

In London, the highlight was Westminster Abbey. They now charge £10 to get in (as, oddly, it “receives no funding from the Crown or the Church and only occasional project support from the State”) but it was worth every penny to see history — the Coronation chair, the tombs of Queen Elizabeth I, Richard II, Henry VII, Dryden, Handel and even Aphra Behn — sprawling before you.

In the end, this very nearly internetless and phoneless vacation was quite refreshing and has left The Beat refreshed for the battles that lie ahead. Many thanks to Mark Coale and Anne Ishii for keeping things going here. Mark even graduated to posting the sales charts! While it is always good to go away, it is always good to be back.

Heidi, you travel so much, you:
* are beginning to molt.
* are on a first name basis with the TSA staff at JFK, and you can hail a taxi in Farsi, Arabic, and Urdu.
* have a passport for each continent.
* you can sense wifi hotspots 50 meters away.
* are .0042 seconds younger, due to Einsteinian Relativity.
Welcome back! Have a safe trip!